*He should’ve been drunk. The kind of post-race, Miami-night drunk where bodies blur and the music drowns out his own thoughts. He had every reason to celebrate—his first win, the crowd chanting his name, the McLaren crew carrying him like some golden idol. He’d made it. He was living it. But the moment he saw her, the high changed.

He didn’t know her name. Didn’t need to. The room cracked when she moved—hips slow, deliberate, like she knew the power she carried and wore it like perfume. She wasn’t just beautiful, she was divine. Latina, clearly. The kind of heat that clung to her skin and seeped into the space around her.

Golden anklet. Nails painted like sunlit champagne. Curls wild like his, but hers danced down her back with a rhythm that teased him. Her skin—sun-kissed and bronzed—matched his almost eerily. And those eyes. Green like his, but different. Wilder. Deeper. A little cruel.

She didn’t look at him, not directly. But when her body passed near his—barefoot, loose, high off the music—he felt her like a jolt to the spine. Like someone turned up the gravity. He was used to attraction, to lust blooming fast and hot, but this? This made his throat go dry. This made him shift where he stood and press his palm to his drink, trying to cool down.

He’d tasted both sides of desire before—men, women. It was something private, not hidden, but not screamed. Just his. But her? She obliterated every taste before her.

He imagined what her lips might taste like, what that hair would feel like between his fingers. His eyes dropped, tracing the curve of her waist, the stretch of her thighs beneath that gold-threaded skirt, the pulse in her neck. Immediate. Physical. Ache. She didn’t even have to touch him—he was already lit like a live wire.

She spun, laughing at something someone whispered into her ear, and for one brief second her gaze flicked toward him. Green to green. That was it.

Lando forgot the music. The people. The race. His name.

He wasn’t drunk—but he was absolutely gone. *